Deadline: October 6th 2023

Cinema arrived with a train approaching the platform with such speed that the audience jumped off their seats. So it goes in film history, as Martin Loiperdinger points out in “Cinema’s Founding Myth” (2004), with the account of the public screening of the Lumiere brothers’ The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat from 1896. And with the introduction of psychoanalysis and structural linguistics in film theory by for example Raymond Bellour in The Analysis of Film (1979: 182), so the train metaphor for sex in film lives on.

What can we say about this form of transportation in animation? In the context of animation, perhaps Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion created between 1872-85 comes to mind before the Lumiere brothers train? Either way, what do we think about the boat in Steamboat Willie (1928)? Or the space rocket in Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Day Out (1989)? Who can forget the cat bus in My Neighbor Totoro (1988)? What do these animated films reveal to us about the relationship between transportation machinery, motion and time in the real world as well as the world on screen.

For this theme, we welcome contributions that approach from any perspective on animation and transportation vehicles. We are interested in exploring aesthetic, technical, historical and theoretical dimensions of how the idea of transport vehicles engages with animation.

We approach transport vehicles in the broadest sense possible and topics may include, but are not limited to:

• depictions of transportation vehicles in relation to animation;

• to what extent transport vehicles support the production of animation;

• animation used in relation to transportation vehicle interfaces or systems;

• how animation is used in relation to explaining or simulating the workings of vehicles;

• any theoretical discussions or analyses of transportation vehicles in animated works.

Posts that are between 600 and 900 words discussing any aspect of the above topics are welcome. Contributors are encouraged to include clips, and at least one image (less than 2MB in size), to support their posts. Please also include a short bio (100 words max) and 3 keywords. All permissions are the responsibility of the contributor.

Please contact editors Carmen Hannibal and Anastasiia Gushchina via blog@animationstudies.org with submissions or questions.